This isn’t the first (or even second) time that I’ve read the short stories collected here, since I’ve had copies of almost all of Charles de Lint’s books for years, but a new (to me) recollection of three of his collections of stories about Newford is an excellent excuse to re-read them once again. What surprised me most about this re-read is how sad many of the stories seemed to be this time around. De Lint has never shied away from tough storylines, telling the brutal reality of the darker side of the world even while his message remains that of hope, but I guess reading the stories during this highly stressful time in the world emphasizes the darkness. Thankfully the final stories in the collection are a bit more uplifting, so we ended on a more positive note! ( )

This is an omnibus collection containing Dreams Underfoot, The Ivory and the Horn, and Moonlight and Vines, which together make up a series of linked short stories from the 1990s. Generally each story stands on its own, but many of them feature some of the same characters, often weaving in and out of each other's lives, and all are set in the fictional city of Newford.

The characters are mostly artistic types -- painters, writers, musicians -- or the downtrodden and marginalized -- street people, victims of various kinds of abuse, gay people in the time of AIDS, the desperately lonely -- or both. And all of them experience encounters of one kind or another with the fantastic or the mysterious in the course of their urban existence. They encounter spirits, or dream powerful dreams, or meet creatures out of myth. Sometimes the results are sad, sometimes hopeful, sometimes bittersweet.

The writing is good. De Lint does some odd things with POV, often switching back and forth between first and third person in a way I can imagine some readers finding annoying, but it worked fine for me. Sometimes the stories do feel a little dated, but not in a particularly bad way. And they capture a feeling of magic in the midst of mundanity very well.

But while I'd say they range from decent to very good, I can't quite shake the feeling that they're trying to be something a bit beyond that, something that crawls into your brain, bypasses your rationality, and makes you feel that sense of enchantment on a deep level. And, while one or two come close, for the most part they never quite got there for me. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's because there's a strong, repeated theme that magic is something you have to believe in without proof, and only then will you see the parts of the world that are hidden from you. That's an idea that can make for good fantasy, but also one that bothers me when I encounter it in the real world, and perhaps these stories feel just grounded enough in the real world to give me a slightly uncomfortable feeling about it.

Still, if you like short, dreamlike lyrical fantasy with one foot in our world and one in some much stranger realm, and are okay with some occasionally very dark subject matter, they are worth a look. Even if 800 pages of them at once may perhaps be a little bit much. ( )

I love all the Newford Books. I'm always sad when it's over. ( )